Aesthetic Pleasure, Computational Models and Brain Activation. The mechanisms behind aesthetic appeal

Abstract

Aesthetic appeal is a peculiarity of human behaviour that involves the integration of sensory information, individual experiences, cultural factors, emotional responses, and context, leading to unique and varied evaluation. Till today there is no consensus of what the main influence of aesthetic appeal is and if aesthetic value is truly a unique form of sensory valuation that is encoded separately in the brain from other forms of value, for example monetary value. In this thesis, we design several experiments to investigate these two issues. In chapter one, we explore the various psychological and neuroscience theories of aesthetic appeal to reveal the current status of the field. In chapter two, we designed a behavioural experiment including 1,190 artworks and 408 participants to determine if emotional instances, subjective factors or formal perceptual features have the most influence on aesthetic appeal. In chapter three, we conducted a behavioural and a fMRI experiment to investigate if there is a behavioural or neural dissociation between aesthetic value compared to incentive salience. Incentive salience was manipulated with a monetary reinforcement paradigm. The results, indicate that aesthetic value is primarily determined by participant-specific influences, but formal perceptual features have a significant but small effect. Also, aesthetic value can be dissociated from other forms of value (incentive salience due to monetary reinforcement) both at a neural and behavioural level. Even though incentive salience had effects on aesthetic value these effects were not robustly observed across experiments. Lastly, the brain region of the anterior medial prefrontal cortex is a potential candidate for context specific value encoding while the ventro medial prefrontal cortex is candidate for context general value encoding. Altogether, the evidence suggests that aesthetic value is not simply a conditioned response, instead aesthetic value is dependent on the insight we gain towards a stimuli based on highly individual experiences